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Category Archives: Uncategorized
Ten Directions
The Rush Back to School
by Kayla Ulrich
As is seen all over the headlines, there’s a rush to get students and teachers back to school. We say come the fall but the reality is most schools go back over summer. This is the same summer that has shown significant spikes in Covid-19 cases and increased death rates of all ages. The worsening of this situation is by no means the fault of schools, but instead is a direct result of the government’s lack of trust in professionals and inability to act. There’s a pressure to get students back in schools to get our economy ‘back to normal’ and allow parents to go to work. The justifications given for this to happen are often pretexts for the need for child-care. What is happening is that we continue (yes, I mean continue) to normalize children dying for the sake of the economy.
While I’d like nothing more than to be reunited with my students, I understand that the most vulnerable students are at risk if we go back to in person learning. One thing we cannot argue is that academics are more easily recovered than a human life.
If you are eager for schools to be back in session because you argue that the most vulnerable students are at risk of falling behind, you are absolutely correct. However, if you have not been advocating for these students prior to this, you need to consider the whole picture. We talk about the ‘achievement gap’ and ‘opportunity gap’ that exists between BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) students and white students, rich and poor, able-bodied and those with disabilities, heterosexual, cisgender students and LGBTQIA+ students, and we have labeled these students who are given less opportunity as at risk or vulnerable. If you have not always advocated for equity in schools and social justice, you need to examine your motives for doing so now to justify going back to school. If your argument is that re-opening schools is necessary to not widen the opportunity gap, you must also acknowledge that in-person schooling contributes to the opportunity gap.
If we claim to need to go back to school for these students, we must acknowledge that BIPOC populations are the most vulnerable in our school system and act on that knowledge. We need to be fully committed to seeking educational justice. Here are ten ideas as to how to support ‘vulnerable’ students.
1.Advocate for socially just teaching, ethnic studies, and rewriting entire curriculums. Many BIPOC students are disadvantaged in schools because the curriculum is whitewashed, Eurocentric and excludes the history, culture and representation of BIPOC students. Libraries and learning needs to be inclusive of all students. Schools need to be a safe place that celebrates the history and excellence of BIPOC, immigrants, LGBTQIA+, homeless, those with learning disabilities, etc. Vidhya Nagarajan for NPR (2017) best represents the many students left out of the system of education in the drawing above. We need to focus on the intersectionality of education and inclusion of all students in the classroom, curriculum and staff. If you are worried about students learning, you need to be worried about what they are being taught. Read more by experts about social justice and anti-racist teaching in the following article: http://neatoday.org/2019/01/22/why-social-justice-in-schools-matters/.
2. Fully fund schools and home libraries for students. Give students access to all the same materials and supplies that their peers have. For this to happen that includes having materials and supplies that represent them. Fully fund libraries that focus on representation of BIPOC students and cultures. Students need access to these materials at school and at home to be successful. Renaissance Learning (2015) found that students who read less than 15 min a day at home were not able to make reading growth, despite classroom interventions. We need all students to have access to quality books, which might include funding more libraries in low-income neighborhoods so they are walking distance from schools or students’ homes. If you’re worried about student learning, you have to be worried about access to learning materials and literacy.
In the article “Why White School Districts Have so Much Money” Lombardo of NPR explores research that concludes that predominately white districts receive $23 billion more in funding than schools with mostly BIPOC students. Based on their research, the national average of school funding is $1,600 less per student for districts serving mostly BIPOC students, while districts that have mostly poor, white students only receive $130 less per student than the national average (Lombardo, 2019). Funding cannot be linked to housing around the school. More than half of our students in the US attend schools that are “racially segregated” (Lombardo, 2019). It’s as if Brown v. Board of Education (1954) never happened.
3. Implement restorative justice practices into schools. Train teachers and staff in anti-racist practices and how to help change behaviors, not punish them. Hold schools accountable for the criminalization of BIPOC students and longterm impact on their lives. If you care about student learning, you have to care about suspension rates that take them out of the classroom and how it is systemically racist. Read more on the African American Policy Forum about how suspension rates disproportionately impact Black students: https://aapf.org/school-to-prison-pipeline.
4. Eradicate standardized testing. Tests are also biased toward white students and not to mention, a huge use of time that might be better spent another way. Students from 3rd grade up take a state standardized test that can take over a month to complete. That’s a MONTH of learning time they lose each year to be able to take a test. My first graders took 6 benchmarks every trimester, which took them about 2-3 weeks to complete. This is 3x a year. By the way, the 3rd grade and up take these benchmarks, in addition to the state test. An immense amount of time is spent on testing! No amount of data is worth losing that much learning time. If you are worried about student learning, you need to be worried about how much time is spent testing students and what those scores mean for schools, tracking, expectation value, etc.
5. Fully fund STEAM in schools (science, technology, engineering, arts and math). I have worked in countless schools in low income areas that do not have funding for things like science and hands-on activities. These things are often paid for by the teachers themselves. Between 79% (USA Today, 2019) and 94% of teachers (Vox, 2019) spend their own money on classroom supplies. This is why places like Donors Choose exist. My last principal actually told the teachers, don’t worry about teaching social studies or science, these kids just need reading. I was told if I get 40% at grade level, that’s the target. The fallacy in this thinking is that by over focusing on literacy, students then lack the content knowledge and experiences to use as background knowledge for reading and writing. “Put simply, the more you know about a topic, the easier it is to read a text, understand it, and retain the information. Previous studies (Alexander, Kulikowich, & Schulze, 1994; Shapiro, 2004) have shown that background knowledge plays an enormous role in reading comprehension (Hirsch, 2003)” (Neuman, Kaefer, Pinkham). If you are worried about student learning, you need to be focused on all content areas and funding for STEAM in schools.
6. Early childhood education needs to be prioritized in our society and offered at no cost to families. This is the foundation of schooling and if only those who can afford preschool attend, they will be starting off Kinder with a leg up on everyone who wasn’t able to go to pre-school. If you’re worried about student learning, you have to know where the gap starts and address it.
7. After school programs should be free and widespread. If students are supposed to get a leg up, they need to build up experiences and background knowledge. They should be active in elective classes and sports. These need to be free and fully funded. If we want justice in our schools, we need to give all students the opportunity to follow their passions, not just those of families that can afford it. If you are worried about student learning, you need to be worried about opportunities to follow their interests outside of school.
8. Move schools to year-round schedules. Having time off in the summer disproportionately impacts the students that are most vulnerable. This infographic made by LoShiavo (2019) illustrates it best. Source: https://www.jaxpubliclibrary.org/ilovejpl/stellar-summer-reading-stats-2019 We are not farmers anymore. We can go to school year round with shorter breaks for students in between that don’t put them at risk of falling behind. If you are worried about student learning, you need to be worried about summer slide.
9. Focus on recruiting, retaining and supporting diverse educators, especially BIPOC teachers, without placing the burden to be the only ones teaching anti-racism. There is essentially no diversity in education, which is irresponsible. We need to recruit and retain diverse teachers. This starts with affordable teaching programs, paying student teachers (that’s right we had to work for half a year with no pay), eliminating the cost of examinations to become a teacher (the CBEST, CSETS and RICA probably cost me a $1,000 for both credentials). This also means that induction should be free (as it was) which is a program new teachers often have to pay out of pocket (depending on their district it’s $1-3k) to “clear” their credential. These systems keep the status quo in place of who can afford to become a teacher. This is called systemic racism. Recruit and retain professionals who are non-white because our world is diverse, and students (and staff) deserve and need to learn about diversity of thought and experience. The next step in retaining teachers is by training all teachers in anti-racist education. More on this subject by experts here: https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/07/08/889112818/what-it-would-take-to-get-an-effective-anti-racist-education. If you’re worried about student learning, you have to care about how schools in the US are systemically racist against BIPOC students and do not retain diverse educators.
10. Fully fund classrooms, and pay teachers for all the time they work. Of course I think teachers deserve higher salaries, however, at the current moment they are not even being paid for the actual work it takes to teach. As a teacher, I’m given one 30 minute period per week when the students receive art, 1 hour after school on our short day (if our meeting doesn’t go over) and 10 minutes in the mornings from when I am supposed to arrive and when I have to pick up students. How then can I adequately plan and prepare lessons for my students, meet with families, address student needs outside of the classroom, hang student work, clean and sanitize materials, respond to office needs, collaborate and also be a human that uses the restroom and what not. I work 2-4 hours a day outside of my contracted time. If not a raise, fine, at least pay teachers for the time it actually takes to do the job. Retaining teachers is also a huge indicator in building relationships and establishing trust between staff and students. If you’re worried about students learning, you have to give students teachers that are treated as professionals. Number one this will give more time for teachers to work on improving their craft, creating more meaningful culturally responsive lessons and when the teacher isn’t frazzled or stressed, the classroom environment benefits from this positively.
While this is lengthy, this is only the tip of the iceberg as far as needs for schools to become just, anti-racist, and equitable places. I agree that distance learning and virtual teaching disadvantages certain populations of students at higher rates. I am not denying this or saying that it is permissible or justifiable. I am saying this, being IN school also has disadvantages for these same populations of students. You cannot address one without the other. If you are arguing that we need to go back to school to help close the opportunity gaps for our students, then you need to also fully advocate for and fund #1-10. Chances are, for the people who are already advocating for #1-10, they also advocate for schools to stay closed until it’s safe because they understand that the schools with less funding have fewer means to provide safe and healthy learning environments for their students. Going back to in-person learning will disproportionately expose the students who attend under funded schools that already struggle to keep classrooms clean and stocked with materials. I truly believe there is nothing that my fellow educators wouldn’t do for their students’ well-being but going back to school isn’t for students’ well-being… is it?
We Need Herd Immunity From Trump and the Coronavirus
It will take more care than the president is currently demonstrating to loosen restrictions but still protect the vulnerable.
By
With each passing day it becomes more obvious how unlucky we are that one of the worst crises in American history coincides with Donald Trump’s presidency. To get out of this crisis with the least loss of life and least damage to our economy, we need a president who can steer a science-based, nonpartisan debate through the hellish ethical, economic and environmental trade-offs we have to make.
We need a president who is a cross between F.D.R., Justice Brandeis and Jonas Salk. We got a president who is a cross between Dr. Phil, Dr. Strangelove and Dr. Seuss.
Sure, Trump isn’t the only one sowing division in our society, but as president he has a megaphone like no one else, so when he spews his politics of division, and suggests disinfectants as cures, he is not only eroding our society’s physical immunity to the coronavirus but also eroding what futurist Marina Gorbis calls our “cognitive immunity” — our ability to filter out science from quackery and facts from fabrications.
As a result, the Trump daily briefing has itself become a public health hazard.
If we don’t have a president who can harmonize our need to protect ourselves from the coronavirus and our need to get back to work — as well as harmonize our need to protect the planet’s ecosystems and our need for economic growth — we are doomed.
Because this virus was actually triggered by our polarization from the natural world. And it will destroy us — physically and economically — if we stay locked in a polarized, binary argument about lives versus livelihoods.
Here is why: When you listen to Trump, one of his consistent themes is that everything was just “perfect” with our economy until — out of nowhere — this black swan, called Covid-19, showed up from China and wrecked it all. It’s true, this virus did come out of Wuhan, China, but it was anything but a black swan that no one could have expected. It was actually “a black elephant.”
The term “black elephant” was coined by environmentalist Adam Sweidan. It’s a cross between “a black swan” — an unlikely, unexpected event with enormous ramifications — and the “elephant in the room” — a looming disaster that is visible to everyone, yet no one wants to address.
Covid-19 was a black elephant. It is the logical outcome of our increasingly destructive wars against nature.
As Johan Rockström, chief scientist at Conservation International, explains: “When you simultaneously hunt for wildlife and push development into natural ecosystems — destroying natural habitats — the natural balance of species collapses due to loss of top predators and other iconic species, leading to an abundance of more generalized species adapted to live in human dominated habitats. These are rats, bats and some primates — which together host 75 percent of all known zoonotic viruses to date, and who can survive and multiply in destroyed human dominated habitats.”
As we humans have become more numerous and concentrated in cities, and as deforestation has brought these generalized species closer to us — and as countries like China, Vietnam and others in central Africa tolerated wet markets where these virus-laden species were mixed with domesticated meats — we’re seeing ever more zoonotic diseases spreading from animals to people. Their names are SARS, MERS, Ebola, bird flu, and swine flu — and Covid-19.
China, in particular, has a lot to answer for. It banned wet markets in one province after SARS in 2003, but then allowed them to reopen after SARS passed — and that apparently brought us Covid-19 out of Wuhan. (Shamefully, China reportedly still has not shut down wet markets selling wildlife.)
Add globalization to this and you have the perfect ingredients for more pandemics. We need to find a much more harmonious balance between economic growth and our ecosystems.
The same kind of harmonic approach has to be brought to our current debate about reopening the economy. One way to get there was proposed by Graham Allison, a national security expert at Harvard.
Allison wrote that we’re having this important debate about our health and economic future in an incredibly uncoordinated way. Instead, we should have federal government experts on one team offering their approach — and a Team B of independent medical, economic, public health, data and strategic analysts offering an alternative approach. And then go for the best synthesis.
For instance, Allison observed: “If we concluded that an identified group of a quarter of the population face an unacceptable risk of death from coronavirus, but that for the other 75 percent, with appropriate precautions like social distancing and masks, face no greater risk than other risks of death we accepted before coronavirus, would it be possible to design a response that protected the most vulnerable while simultaneously reopening most of the economy for others?”
As an example of Team B thinking, Graham cited the work of Dr. David Katz, a public health expert who helped kick off the debate about how to harmonize protecting the most vulnerable and opening the economy to those least at risk in an essay he wrote in The New York Times on March 20 — and in a follow-up interview we did together.
Five weeks later — and fresh off three days as a volunteer emergency room doctor in the Bronx — Katz still believes that is possible. He explained to me why, starting with what he found in the emergency ward.
“You might think that health professionals are at one extreme of opinion, concerned only about the virus and favoring locking everything down, but that was not the view I encountered,” said Katz. “The view was far more centrist: respect for the infection, but equal respect for the high cost of closing down everything — to their patients, of course, but also to themselves and their families. Many were acutely concerned about layoffs, unemployment, and real desperation affecting siblings or close friends.”
That is why, Katz insists, we have to avoid minimizing the degree to which mass unemployment, poverty, hunger and despair will devastate people if the economy remains virtually shut down. At the same time, we can’t just submit to protesters demanding their governors open everything back up indiscriminately, without data or a comprehensive health strategy,
“The moment you stop respecting this virus, it will kill someone you love,” he said.
The best strategy, argues Katz, starts with what the numbers are telling us: “More and more data are telling us that Covid-19 is two completely different diseases in different populations. It is severe and potentially lethal to the old, the chronically ill and those with pre-existing conditions. It is, however, rarely life-threatening, often mild — and often even asymptomatic — among those under 50 or 60 in generally good health.”
While we still don’t yet have a perfect understanding of how the virus works — and we need to corroborate the patterns we’re seeing through more random sampling of the U.S. population both for infection and immunity — if these patterns are confirmed, then the proper strategy, argued Katz, is one of “total harm minimization” that saves the most lives and health through “vertical interdiction.”
“That means sheltering the vulnerable, while allowing those who can return to the world most safely to do so — thereby restoring the economy, supply chains, and services, while cultivating the collective protection of herd immunity that leads to the ‘all clear,’” said Katz. “That’s how we get our lives back without waiting on the long and uncertain timeline of vaccine development.”
Of course, we’ll need an army of public health workers to keep doing testing and contact tracing so we can adapt to new data, limit breakouts and protect those most likely to die or be badly harmed from Covid-19.
The bottom line is that Mother Nature has been telling us something huge in this crisis: “You let everything get out of balance and go to extremes. You ravaged my ecosystems and unleashed this virus. You let political extremism ravage your body politic. You need to get back into balance, and that starts with using the immune system that I endowed you with.”
Herd immunity, which kicks in after about 60 percent of the population is exposed to and recovers from the virus, concluded Katz, “has historically been nature’s way of ending pandemics. We need to bend with her forces, while concentrating our health services and social services on protecting those most vulnerable who need to stay sheltered until there is a vaccine.”
Did Trump Suggest Injecting Disinfectants as COVID-19 Treatment?
The U.S. president’s comments prompted doctors and the makers of household disinfectants to issue statements urging people not to ingest or inject cleaning products.
PUBLISHED 24 APRIL 2020
Claim
U.S. President Donald Trump suggested during a White House briefing that injecting disinfectants could treat COVID-19.
Rating
True
How the Pandemic Will End
The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.
Story by Ed Yong
Three months ago, no one knew that SARS-CoV-2 existed. Now the virus has spread to almost every country, infecting at least 446,000 people whom we know about, and many more whom we do not. It has crashed economies and broken health-care systems, filled hospitals and emptied public spaces. It has separated people from their workplaces and their friends. It has disrupted modern society on a scale that most living people have never witnessed. Soon, most everyone in the United States will know someone who has been infected. Like World War II or the 9/11 attacks, this pandemic has already imprinted itself upon the nation’s psyche.
A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers, and op-eds warning of the possibility. Bill Gates has been telling anyone who would listen, including the 18 million viewers of his TED Talk. In 2018, I wrote a story for The Atlantic arguing that America was not ready for the pandemic that would eventually come. In October, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security war-gamed what might happen if a new coronavirus swept the globe. And then one did. Hypotheticals became reality. “What if?” became “Now what?”
Anne Applebaum: The coronavirus called America’s bluff
“No matter what, a virus [like SARS-CoV-2] was going to test the resilience of even the most well-equipped health systems,” says Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious-diseases physician at the Boston University School of Medicine. More transmissible and fatal than seasonal influenza, the new coronavirus is also stealthier, spreading from one host to another for several days before triggering obvious symptoms. To contain such a pathogen, nations must develop a test and use it to identify infected people, isolate them, and trace those they’ve had contact with. That is what South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong did to tremendous effect. It is what the United States did not.
The testing fiasco was the original sin of America’s pandemic failure, the single flaw that undermined every other countermeasure. If the country could have accurately tracked the spread of the virus, hospitals could have executed their pandemic plans, girding themselves by allocating treatment rooms, ordering extra supplies, tagging in personnel, or assigning specific facilities to deal with COVID-19 cases. None of that happened. Instead, a health-care system that already runs close to full capacity, and that was already challenged by a severe flu season, was suddenly faced with a virus that had been left to spread, untracked, through communities around the country. Overstretched hospitals became overwhelmed. Basic protective equipment, such as masks, gowns, and gloves, began to run out. Beds will soon follow, as will the ventilators that provide oxygen to patients whose lungs are besieged by the virus.
Derek Thompson: America is acting like a failed state
Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared. “Much worse,” said Ron Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014. “Beyond any expectations we had,” said Lauren Sauer, who works on disaster preparedness at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “As an American, I’m horrified,” said Seth Berkley, who heads Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. “The U.S. may end up with the worst outbreak in the industrialized world.”
I. The Next Months
Having fallen behind, it will be difficult—but not impossible—for the United States to catch up. To an extent, the near-term future is set because COVID-19 is a slow and long illness. People who were infected several days ago will only start showing symptoms now, even if they isolated themselves in the meantime. Some of those people will enter intensive-care units in early April. As of last weekend, the nation had 17,000 confirmed cases, but the actual number was probably somewhere between 60,000 and 245,000. Numbers are now starting to rise exponentially: As of Wednesday morning, the official case count was 54,000, and the actual case count is unknown. Health-care workers are already seeing worrying signs: dwindling equipment, growing numbers of patients, and doctors and nurses who are themselves becoming infected.
Italy and Spain offer grim warnings about the future. Hospitals are out of room, supplies, and staff. Unable to treat or save everyone, doctors have been forced into the unthinkable: rationing care to patients who are most likely to survive, while letting others die. The U.S. has fewer hospital beds per capita than Italy. A study
released by a team at Imperial College London concluded that if the pandemic is left unchecked, those beds will all be full by late April. By the end of June, for every available critical-care bed, there will be roughly 15 COVID-19 patients in need of one. By the end of the summer, the pandemic will have directly killed 2.2 million Americans, notwithstanding those who will indirectly die as hospitals are unable to care for the usual slew of heart attacks, strokes, and car accidents. This is the worst-case scenario. To avert it, four things need to happen—and quickly.
Read: All the president’s lies about the coronavirus
The first and most important is to rapidly produce masks, gloves, and other personal protective equipment. If health-care workers can’t stay healthy, the rest of the response will collapse. In some places, stockpiles are already so low that doctors are reusing masks between patients, calling for donations from the public, or sewing their own homemade alternatives. These shortages are happening because medical supplies are made-to-order and depend on byzantine international supply chains that are currently straining and snapping. Hubei province in China, the epicenter of the pandemic, was also a manufacturing center of medical masks.
In the U.S., the Strategic National Stockpile—a national larder of medical equipment—is already being deployed, especially to the hardest-hit states. The stockpile is not inexhaustible, but it can buy some time. Donald Trump could use that time to invoke the Defense Production Act, launching a wartime effort in which American manufacturers switch to making medical equipment. But after invoking the act last Wednesday, Trump has failed to actually use it, reportedly due to lobbying from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and heads of major corporations.
Some manufacturers are already rising to the challenge, but their efforts are piecemeal and unevenly distributed. “One day, we’ll wake up to a story of doctors in City X who are operating with bandanas, and a closet in City Y with masks piled into it,” says Ali Khan, the dean of public health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. A “massive logistics and supply-chain operation [is] now needed across the country,” says Thomas Inglesby of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That can’t be managed by small and inexperienced teams scattered throughout the White House. The solution, he says, is to tag in the Defense Logistics Agency—a 26,000-person group that prepares the U.S. military for overseas operations and that has assisted in past public-health crises, including the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
Read: Why the coronavirus has been so successful
Some shortages are being addressed. The FDA is now moving quickly to approve tests developed by private labs. At least one can deliver results in less than an hour, potentially allowing doctors to know if the patient in front of them has COVID-19. The country “is adding capacity on a daily basis,” says Kelly Wroblewski of the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
On March 6, Trump said that “anyone who wants a test can get a test.” That was (and still is) untrue, and his own officials were quick to correct him. Regardless, anxious people still flooded into hospitals, seeking tests that did not exist. “People wanted to be tested even if they weren’t symptomatic, or if they sat next to someone with a cough,” says Saskia Popescu of George Mason University, who works to prepare hospitals for pandemics. Others just had colds, but doctors still had to use masks to examine them, burning through their already dwindling supplies. “It really stressed the health-care system,” Popescu says. Even now, as capacity expands, tests must be used carefully. The first priority, says Marc Lipsitch of Harvard, is to test health-care workers and hospitalized patients, allowing hospitals to quell any ongoing fires. Only later, once the immediate crisis is slowing, should tests be deployed in a more widespread way. “This isn’t just going to be: Let’s get the tests out there!” Inglesby says.
Juliette Kayyem: The crisis could last 18 months. Be prepared.
Persuading a country to voluntarily stay at home is not easy, and without clear guidelines from the White House, mayors, governors, and business owners have been forced to take their own steps. Some states have banned large gatherings or closed schools and restaurants. At least 21 have now instituted some form of mandatory quarantine, compelling people to stay at home. And yet many citizens continue to crowd into public spaces.
In these moments, when the good of all hinges on the sacrifices of many, clear coordination matters—the fourth urgent need. The importance of social distancing must be impressed upon a public who must also be reassured and informed. Instead, Trump has repeatedly played down the problem, telling America that “we have it very well under control” when we do not, and that cases were “going to be down to close to zero” when they were rising. In some cases, as with his claims about ubiquitous testing, his misleading gaffes have deepened the crisis. He has even touted unproven medications.
Read: Grocery stores are the coronavirus tipping point
But Trump already seems to be wavering. In recent days, he has signaled that he is prepared to backtrack on social-distancing policies in a bid to protect the economy. Pundits and business leaders have used similar rhetoric, arguing that high-risk people, such as the elderly, could be protected while lower-risk people are allowed to go back to work. Such thinking is seductive, but flawed. It overestimates our ability to assess a person’s risk, and to somehow wall off the ‘high-risk’ people from the rest of society. It underestimates how badly the virus can hit ‘low-risk’ groups, and how thoroughly hospitals will be overwhelmed if even just younger demographics are falling sick.
A recent analysis from the University of Pennsylvania estimated that even if social-distancing measures can reduce infection rates by 95 percent, 960,000 Americans will still need intensive care. There are only about 180,000 ventilators in the U.S. and, more pertinently, only enough respiratory therapists and critical-care staff to safely look after 100,000 ventilated patients. Abandoning social distancing would be foolish. Abandoning it now, when tests and protective equipment are still scarce, would be catastrophic.
Read: America’s hospitals have never experienced anything like this
If Trump stays the course, if Americans adhere to social distancing, if testing can be rolled out, and if enough masks can be produced, there is a chance that the country can still avert the worst predictions about COVID-19, and at least temporarily bring the pandemic under control. No one knows how long that will take, but it won’t be quick. “It could be anywhere from four to six weeks to up to three months,” Fauci said, “but I don’t have great confidence in that range.”
II. The Endgame
Even a perfect response won’t end the pandemic. As long as the virus persists somewhere, there’s a chance that one infected traveler will reignite fresh sparks in countries that have already extinguished their fires. This is already happening in China, Singapore, and other Asian countries that briefly seemed to have the virus under control. Under these conditions, there are three possible endgames: one that’s very unlikely, one that’s very dangerous, and one that’s very long.
The first is that every nation manages to simultaneously bring the virus to heel, as with the original SARS in 2003. Given how widespread the coronavirus pandemic is, and how badly many countries are faring, the odds of worldwide synchronous control seem vanishingly small.
The second is that the virus does what past flu pandemics have done: It burns through the world and leaves behind enough immune survivors that it eventually struggles to find viable hosts. This “herd immunity” scenario would be quick, and thus tempting. But it would also come at a terrible cost: SARS-CoV-2 is more transmissible and fatal than the flu, and it would likely leave behind many millions of corpses and a trail of devastated health systems. The United Kingdom initially seemed to consider this herd-immunity strategy, before backtracking when models revealed the dire consequences. The U.S. now seems to be considering it too.
Read: What will you do if you start coughing?
The third scenario is that the world plays a protracted game of whack-a-mole with the virus, stamping out outbreaks here and there until a vaccine can be produced. This is the best option, but also the longest and most complicated.
It depends, for a start, on making a vaccine. If this were a flu pandemic, that would be easier. The world is experienced at making flu vaccines and does so every year. But there are no existing vaccines for coronaviruses—until now, these viruses seemed to cause diseases that were mild or rare—so researchers must start from scratch. The first steps have been impressively quick. Last Monday, a possible vaccine created by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health went into early clinical testing. That marks a 63-day gap between scientists sequencing the virus’s genes for the first time and doctors injecting a vaccine candidate into a person’s arm. “It’s overwhelmingly the world record,” Fauci said.
But it’s also the fastest step among many subsequent slow ones. The initial trial will simply tell researchers if the vaccine seems safe, and if it can actually mobilize the immune system. Researchers will then need to check that it actually prevents infection from SARS-CoV-2. They’ll need to do animal tests and large-scale trials to ensure that the vaccine doesn’t cause severe side effects. They’ll need to work out what dose is required, how many shots people need, if the vaccine works in elderly people, and if it requires other chemicals to boost its effectiveness.
Read: COVID-19 vaccines are coming, but they’re not what you think
It’s likely, then, that the new coronavirus will be a lingering part of American life for at least a year, if not much longer. If the current round of social-distancing measures works, the pandemic may ebb enough for things to return to a semblance of normalcy. Offices could fill and bars could bustle. Schools could reopen and friends could reunite. But as the status quo returns, so too will the virus. This doesn’t mean that society must be on continuous lockdown until 2022. But “we need to be prepared to do multiple periods of social distancing,” says Stephen Kissler of Harvard.
Second: duration of immunity. When people are infected by the milder human coronaviruses that cause cold-like symptoms, they remain immune for less than a year. By contrast, the few who were infected by the original SARS virus, which was far more severe, stayed immune for much longer. Assuming that SARS-CoV-2 lies somewhere in the middle, people who recover from their encounters might be protected for a couple of years. To confirm that, scientists will need to develop accurate serological tests, which look for the antibodies that confer immunity. They’ll also need to confirm that such antibodies actually stop people from catching or spreading the virus. If so, immune citizens can return to work, care for the vulnerable, and anchor the economy during bouts of social distancing.
Whether through accumulating herd immunity or the long-awaited arrival of a vaccine, the virus will find spreading explosively more and more difficult. It’s unlikely to disappear entirely. The vaccine may need to be updated as the virus changes, and people may need to get revaccinated on a regular basis, as they currently do for the flu. Models suggest that the virus might simmer around the world, triggering epidemics every few years or so. “But my hope and expectation is that the severity would decline, and there would be less societal upheaval,” Kissler says. In this future, COVID-19 may become like the flu is today—a recurring scourge of winter. Perhaps it will eventually become so mundane that even though a vaccine exists, large swaths of Gen C won’t bother getting it, forgetting how dramatically their world was molded by its absence.
III. The Aftermath
The cost of reaching that point, with as few deaths as possible, will be enormous. As my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote, the economy is experiencing a shock “more sudden and severe than anyone alive has ever experienced.” About one in five people in the United States have lost working hours or jobs. Hotels are empty. Airlines are grounding flights. Restaurants and other small businesses are closing. Inequalities will widen: People with low incomes will be hardest-hit by social-distancing measures, and most likely to have the chronic health conditions that increase their risk of severe infections. Diseases have destabilized cities and societies many times over, “but it hasn’t happened in this country in a very long time, or to quite the extent that we’re seeing now,” says Elena Conis, a historian of medicine at UC Berkeley. “We’re far more urban and metropolitan. We have more people traveling great distances and living far from family and work.”
After infections begin ebbing, a secondary pandemic of mental-health problems will follow. At a moment of profound dread and uncertainty, people are being cut off from soothing human contact. Hugs, handshakes, and other social rituals are now tinged with danger. People with anxiety or obsessive-compulsive disorder are struggling. Elderly people, who are already excluded from much of public life, are being asked to distance themselves even further, deepening their loneliness. Asian people are suffering racist insults, fueled by a president who insists on labeling the new coronavirus the “Chinese virus.” Incidents of domestic violence and child abuse are likely to spike as people are forced to stay in unsafe homes. Children, whose bodies are mostly spared by the virus, may endure mental trauma that stays with them into adulthood.
Read: The kids aren’t all right
After the pandemic, people who recover from COVID-19 might be shunned and stigmatized, as were survivors of Ebola, SARS, and HIV. Health-care workers will take time to heal: One to two years after SARS hit Toronto, people who dealt with the outbreak were still less productive and more likely to be experiencing burnout and post-traumatic stress. People who went through long bouts of quarantine will carry the scars of their experience. “My colleagues in Wuhan note that some people there now refuse to leave their homes and have developed agoraphobia,” says Steven Taylor of the University of British Columbia, who wrote The Psychology of Pandemics.
But “there is also the potential for a much better world after we get through this trauma,” says Richard Danzig of the Center for a New American Security. Already, communities are finding new ways of coming together, even as they must stay apart. Attitudes to health may also change for the better. The rise of HIV and AIDS “completely changed sexual behavior among young people who were coming into sexual maturity at the height of the epidemic,” Conis says. “The use of condoms became normalized. Testing for STDs became mainstream.” Similarly, washing your hands for 20 seconds, a habit that has historically been hard to enshrine even in hospitals, “may be one of those behaviors that we become so accustomed to in the course of this outbreak that we don’t think about them,” Conis adds.
Aspects of America’s identity may need rethinking after COVID-19. Many of the country’s values have seemed to work against it during the pandemic. Its individualism, exceptionalism, and tendency to equate doing whatever you want with an act of resistance meant that when it came time to save lives and stay indoors, some people flocked to bars and clubs. Having internalized years of anti-terrorism messaging following 9/11, Americans resolved to not live in fear. But SARS-CoV-2 has no interest in their terror, only their cells.
Years of isolationist rhetoric had consequences too. Citizens who saw China as a distant, different place, where bats are edible and authoritarianism is acceptable, failed to consider that they would be next or that they wouldn’t be ready. (China’s response to this crisis had its own problems, but that’s for another time.) “People believed the rhetoric that containment would work,” says Wendy Parmet, who studies law and public health at Northeastern University. “We keep them out, and we’ll be okay. When you have a body politic that buys into these ideas of isolationism and ethnonationalism, you’re especially vulnerable when a pandemic hits.”
Graeme Wood: The ‘Chinese virus’ is a test. Don’t fail it.
Veterans of past epidemics have long warned that American society is trapped in a cycle of panic and neglect. After every crisis—anthrax, SARS, flu, Ebola—attention is paid and investments are made. But after short periods of peacetime, memories fade and budgets dwindle. This trend transcends red and blue administrations. When a new normal sets in, the abnormal once again becomes unimaginable. But there is reason to think that COVID-19 might be a disaster that leads to more radical and lasting change.
The other major epidemics of recent decades either barely affected the U.S. (SARS, MERS, Ebola), were milder than expected (H1N1 flu in 2009), or were mostly limited to specific groups of people (Zika, HIV). The COVID-19 pandemic, by contrast, is affecting everyone directly, changing the nature of their everyday life. That distinguishes it not only from other diseases, but also from the other systemic challenges of our time. When an administration prevaricates on climate change, the effects won’t be felt for years, and even then will be hard to parse. It’s different when a president says that everyone can get a test, and one day later, everyone cannot. Pandemics are democratizing experiences. People whose privilege and power would normally shield them from a crisis are facing quarantines, testing positive, and losing loved ones. Senators are falling sick. The consequences of defunding public-health agencies, losing expertise, and stretching hospitals are no longer manifesting as angry opinion pieces, but as faltering lungs.
Such changes, in themselves, might protect the world from the next inevitable disease. “The countries that had lived through SARS had a public consciousness about this that allowed them to leap into action,” said Ron Klain, the former Ebola czar. “The most commonly uttered sentence in America at the moment is, ‘I’ve never seen something like this before.’ That wasn’t a sentence anyone in Hong Kong uttered.” For the U.S., and for the world, it’s abundantly, viscerally clear what a pandemic can do.
The lessons that America draws from this experience are hard to predict, especially at a time when online algorithms and partisan broadcasters only serve news that aligns with their audience’s preconceptions. Such dynamics will be pivotal in the coming months, says Ilan Goldenberg, a foreign-policy expert at the Center for a New American Security. “The transitions after World War II or 9/11 were not about a bunch of new ideas,” he says. “The ideas are out there, but the debates will be more acute over the next few months because of the fluidity of the moment and willingness of the American public to accept big, massive changes.”
One could also envisage a future in which America learns a different lesson. A communal spirit, ironically born through social distancing, causes people to turn outward, to neighbors both foreign and domestic. The election of November 2020 becomes a repudiation of “America first” politics. The nation pivots, as it did after World War II, from isolationism to international cooperation. Buoyed by steady investments and an influx of the brightest minds, the health-care workforce surges. Gen C kids write school essays about growing up to be epidemiologists. Public health becomes the centerpiece of foreign policy. The U.S. leads a new global partnership focused on solving challenges like pandemics and climate change.
In 2030, SARS-CoV-3 emerges from nowhere, and is brought to heel within a month.
Left-leaning critics of U.S. President Donald Trump rejected his claims to overseeing unprecedented economic growth in early 2020. Who was right?
by DAN MACGUILL
Origin
In February 2020, we received multiple inquiries from readers about the veracity of social media posts and news articles which claimed that the U.S. economy had added 1.5 million more jobs during former President Barack Obama’s final three years in office, than it did during President Donald Trump’s first three years.
On Feb. 17, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-New York, tweeted that Obama had “created 1.5 million more jobs in his last 3 years than Donald Trump has in his first 3 years.”
Earlier, the left-leaning Democratic Coalition group posted a link to a Yahoo! News article with the headline “Trump’s First 3 Years Created 1.5 Million Fewer Jobs Than Obama’s Last 3,” adding “FACT: New figures from Trump’s own Department of Labor show that 6.6 million new jobs were created in the first 36 months of Trump’s tenure, compared with 8.1 million in the final 36 months of Obama’s ― a decline of 19% under Trump.”
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